~~This
story originally appeared in The Fourth
River (2006)
Squatting
at the end of Aisle One, Henry Pruitt is setting up a display of crabgrass
killer at his hardware store on Dewitt
Street
As he stands back to admire the tidy arrangement of box
on box, Captain Thomas J. Smith is passing under the State Street bridge, the
prow of his aged wooden boat pointed westward on the New York State Barge
Canal. A cluster of three women stare at
his approach from the door of The Quilting Bee, while customers on the
Canalside Café’s dining deck squint at the sun-glared water until the old man,
rope in hand, leaps from his boat onto the towpath, stopping at the landing
below the restaurant deck. From the time
he is first spotted, his advance is steady, unhurried, almost dreamy, yet his
arrival will always be described as coming like a bolt out of the blue.
By
rights, Henry’s daughter Eunice should have been the first to spot the
captain. Eunice is the self-appointed
guardian of the canal, pacing its bank even in the gray chill of winter when
the canal is empty or in the dampness of early spring when the canal
re-opens. She’s been there since ten
o’clock this morning, alone as usual, sitting in dappled shade on the south
bank of the canal, west of the Main
Street
At
the moment of Captain Smith’s arrival she is looking in the opposite direction,
watching a group of scum dunkers, exuberant boys of eleven, twelve or thirteen,
as they jump from the railroad bridge into the murky water of the canal, then
scramble back to repeat their act of daring.
The scene is like a snapshot. The
air is still, the water placid; flat-bottomed cumulus clouds hang motionless. Yet it is not a snapshot. A breeze picks up. A boy leaps from the bridge, disturbing the
water of the canal. Updrafts and
downdrafts wander the cloud’s interior, changing its size and shape.
Change is
startling, though, especially in this town.
The four corners of the village center have boasted the same brick
buildings for over 150 years. The black
walnut tree by the State Street Erie Canal , which opened
in 1825. By the Civil War the railroad
had stolen the Erie ’s thunder, but it was the
canal that made New York the Empire State
At
the moment, Henry is intent on his display work. He isn’t thinking about the canal, and he
doesn’t know about Captain Smith yet. He
isn’t even thinking about Eunice, although she keeps house for him as well as
teaching school. Surely scum dunkers,
crazy galoots as Henry calls them, are the farthest thing from his mind. “What’s the matter with parents these days,”
Henry has asked many a time, “letting their kids be so foolhardy?” He forgets that boys were doing the same
thing twenty-odd years ago when Eunice was that age.
Although
Henry never knew it, Eunice used to secretly watch the scum-dunking boys from
her class at school. She’d be there for
hours, hiding in the leaves of the weeping willow, its branches dipping to
almost touch the water at the canal’s edge.
Now she is in plain view, but these boys don’t notice her. They are more interested in proving how
daring they are. Their mothers warn
repeatedly that the dirty canal water is apt to cause disease, not to mention
that what they are doing is against the law.
To the boys such dire warnings make it all the more satisfying. It shows their determination to be masters of
their own lives.
If anyone asked Eunice why she is watching so intently, she might say it puts her in mind of when she was that age. In fact, if she were the kind who liked to talk she might go on to say that the skinny boy with longish dark hair reminds her of Ari Farr the way he flicks his wet hair back from his face. And the blond one could be Joe Weaver, the chunky one Eddie Morrison, the stringbean Irvin Simmons.
If anyone asked Eunice why she is watching so intently, she might say it puts her in mind of when she was that age. In fact, if she were the kind who liked to talk she might go on to say that the skinny boy with longish dark hair reminds her of Ari Farr the way he flicks his wet hair back from his face. And the blond one could be Joe Weaver, the chunky one Eddie Morrison, the stringbean Irvin Simmons.
To
Henry, Eunice’s girlhood was only yesterday, but the students she teaches at
the high school would find it hard to believe that she was ever young. Seeing her make her dreamy way in the halls
between classes, students snicker, nudging one another. “She wanders lonely as a cloud,” they stay,
mocking Eunice’s high, tremulous recitation of Wordsworth’s poem. She was young? Impossible!
She’s
been a fixture at the high school for fourteen years. Her students calculate her age to be around
thirty-six, old enough to be set in her ways, old enough to speak of Emily
Dickinson as though she were a personal friend, older than they expect to be at
thirty-six, not that they can imagine they will ever be that old.
Her
students would be amazed to learn that Eunice Pruitt was once engaged to
marry. That was long ago, though, when
Eunice was a first year teacher, fresh out of SUNY Geneseo. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge
since then— her mother’s death from cancer, her father’s grieving, all those
years of teaching Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron to students whose taste
in poetry runs more to rock lyrics than the exquisite language of the poets
Eunice offers them. The years have piled
one on another like duplicate sheets from the copier when she is running off
one of her pop quizzes, the same quizzes she has popped in all the years before. By now, even to Eunice that brief taste of
love must seem like ancient history.
Still, as Henry says, “You take the life that’s given you.”
A
canoe or two has paddled by today, but the glory days of the canal are long
gone. When the project was first
underway, its detractors dubbed it Clinton
Eunice
is absorbed in looking west until the boy who reminds her of Ari Farr points
toward the Main Street
The
boys race along the towpath toward the landing by Canalside Café where a small crowd has gathered to
watch the grizzled old man tie up his flat, wooden blunt-bowed boat, the kind that
plied this waterway in the 1800s. Then
he turns his attention to the mules that have been pulling it.
At
first the people only talk among themselves.
It isn’t that they are stuck up or unfriendly, although they have been
called smug. It’s more that they are
reserved, and this newcomer is unquestionably
odd. The old man doesn’t pay much
attention to them. He’s more interested
in his mules.
Finally,
Charley Mitchell, an insurance broker here in town and one of Henry’s cronies,
starts the ball rolling, asking questions to find out more about the man. You don’t give up easily if you want to sell
insurance, but this old fellow is a tough nut to crack. After a while Charley seems to be at a loss
for ideas.
No one in
the crowd expects Eunice Pruitt to pick up the ball. She is standing near the back, but she pipes
up, her voice small and trembly, “Do you take passengers?”
The
old man, packing tobacco in his pipe, looks up to scan the crowd until his eyes
rest on Eunice as she fingers the contents of the large patch pockets of her
full cotton skirt and looks down at her feet.
“Sometimes,”
he says quietly. “Sometimes.”
His
answer is enough encouragement to set off a barrage of questions from the
crowd. Do you book parties? What are your rates? Do you take school groups?
He
makes no reply until one of the boys asks, “Give us a ride, mister?” He says no, hops back on board the boat and
disappears below deck.
In
the fall when someone stops by the hardware store for a rake or a bulb planter or a bag of fertilizer and
conversation turns to the day Captain Smith showed up, Henry Pruitt will say
again, “I didn’t know how it would
change my life when that old man tied up his boat there at
the landing.” But Henry is
mistaken. Change isn’t like that. The seed of change is planted unnoticed. It germinates in darkness. By the time it’s visible, it’s already
growing. He shouldn’t blame it all on
Captain Smith.
This
town has grown a lot. In some ways,
though, it keeps the feeling of the smaller town it used to be. A dairy farm still operates a stone’s throw
from where the canal cuts through the village center. It runs a small processing operation and
sells milk to everyone in town who cares about real taste. Eunice buys her cream-top milk there.
The
men who do business in the village still gather at ten o’clock each morning at
Thompson’s Coffee Shop to talk of this and that. Charley Mitchell is always there, and Fred Burton, the pharmacist,
and Lou Sutherland from the bank, and John Norville, the editor of the Post, the local paper, and Henry Pruitt
and Jeffrey Lambert who owns an antique shop by the canal. Walt Thompson is there, too, of course, and
never afraid to put in his two cents worth.
Since
the group doesn’t have an official charter, they’ve been able to keep it as an
all-male group. Eunice wouldn’t dream of
intruding except for the once that her mother coughed up blood and the time the
squirrel fell down the chimney and ran wild through the house.
The
men talk about the weather and the economy and politics and whatever comes
up. Last spring they had quite a time
chewing over an article in the Democrat and
Chronicle about some archeological work being done in one of the towns
east of here. The fellow in charge mentioned in the
interview that he had lived here as a boy, that his interest in the canal was
sparked back then. Charley Mitchell
recalled that he was the middle son of the Farrs, a
family of intellectual screwballs who used to live here before they moved to Costa Rica
What made
it even more interesting, though, was that it was the same fellow Eunice once
was going to marry. Must have given
Henry quite a start to see the fellow’s picture, they all said. Joined the Peace Corps, hadn’t he? How’d he get interested in archeology of all
things? Henry shrugged. That was thirteen, fourteen years ago, he
reminded them. It was an odd way to make
a living, but as even Henry had to admit, the fellow was an odd sort. “Maybe with a name like Aristotle he was
bound to be set apart,” someone said.
Jeffrey
Lambert made the mistake of asking if the Pruitts ever heard from him
anymore. Fred Burton kicked him under
the table, but it was too late. Jeffrey
didn’t live here when Eunice called the engagement off. He wouldn’t have heard the rumors that
circulated later about the fellow picking up and living with some girl he met
at a commune in Vermont
“You know,”
he confided to Fred later, “I’m afraid my Eunice is naïve. She wanted to send that article off to
him. I told her it’s best to keep the
past in the past, but she didn’t seem to get the point. ‘It’s only a clipping,’
she told me. I told her, ‘The Pruitts
have their pride.’”
Since Smith
showed up here with that old canalboat, that’s what all the talk at the coffee shop is about. Some say the old guy and his boat are causing
too many problems, especially with traffic
and parking as the curious flock to see this relic from the past. Surely there’s an ordinance somewhere on the
books that could force him to move on. Others, particularly the shop owners along
the canal, argue that the canalboat tied up here is a boon to business and
besides, he’s not hurting anything. He
was very obliging, in fact, when the Canalside Café complained that the smell
of his mules was offensive to al fresco diners.
He moved down closer to the State
Street
On
one point everyone agrees. They’d feel a
lot more comfortable if the captain would provide more complete explanations.
Even
Eunice seems caught up in curiosity about him.
Usually she keeps her distance, but she showed up where he was moored
the second afternoon with a plate of her Congo
Henry
would admit that ordinarily Eunice doesn’t have much to say even at the dinner
table. Usually, over pork chops or
meatloaf or macaroni and cheese, Henry talks about what he’s heard at
Thompson’s or this or that about the hardware store. He understands what a blow it was to Eunice
when her mother died thirteen years ago.
Eunice had been such a comfort to
her in those long months of illness. It
was not surprising she had crawled into her
shell. His own grief had been
unbearable. So when Eunice babbles on about her
chat with the old captain, Henry is pleased and vaguely amused. The next day, though, when the men ask him
what the old guy and Eunice talked about, Henry can’t
think of a single thing of substance in all his daughter’s chatter.
“Not much,”
he tells them. “Small talk mostly.” He doesn’t tell them the only thing he can
recall. It sounds too silly.
“Captain
Smith says he thinks that Canajoharie is the loveliest name of any town on the
canal,” she told him. “He says it so it
rhymes with Thomas Hardy, without the “d” of course, instead of rhyming with
Harry, the way you hear it now.
Canajoharie. Isn’t that
wonderful?”
When
Henry had no comment, she went on. “I
think he’s right. Think of the
others. Albany Utica Syracuse Rochester Buffalo Schenectady
But
Henry didn’t say it. He said, “Pass the
salt.”
As
his daughter’s visits take on a daily pattern and her dinner table babblings
continue, Henry pays more attention, knowing that his friends will be looking
for a report the next day at Thompson’s.
While everyone stops to look over the boat and pass the time with the
captain, only Eunice is invited to sit on the deck, only Eunice is not dismissed
while he attends the mules or some chore that needs doing below deck.
Henry
is the center of attention at Thompson’s.
One day he tells them that the original canal was built without the
advice of a single professional engineer, that the chief engineers were actually two
country lawyers who had never even seen a real canal. Another day they discuss the strategy of
beginning the digging in the middle in the flat land around Rome Erie
“I
don’t suppose this captain has mentioned why he happened to tie up here,” says
John Norville.
“Resting
his mules,” Henry answers promptly. “At
least, as far as I know,” he adds.
Later
that afternoon when Fred stops by the hardware store for a couple molly screws,
Henry asks, “Do you notice anything different about Eunice lately?”
Fred
shrugs. “I wouldn’t worry, Henry. They’re right in plain view of everyone
sitting on that deck. She was quite
chipper the other day when she came to pick up your prescription. Let her be happy.”
“I’m
only looking out for her. You know, as
she works about the kitchen lately,” Henry confides, lowering his voice and
directing his words to Fred’s shoulder, “she hums.”
That
evening at the dinner table, Eunice tells him of the great difficulties
encountered when they cut the canal through the Montezuma swamp. “All the glory goes to the aqueducts and the
locks they built,” says Eunice, “but the cut through the Montezuma swamp was
just as hard, maybe harder. More lives
were lost in that flat, buggy, desolate stretch than any other section of the
canal. Malaria was rampant. The workers, mostly Irish, dropped like
flies.”
“Lucky
they were Irish,” Henry chuckles.
“That’s something the Irish are good at— making more little Irishmen.”
Eunice
purses her lips and glares.
“Just
a joke,” says Henry. “Don’t take
everything so seriously.”
“That’s
just the way they were back then. Just
another Pat, they’d say, as though somehow those lives counted less, nameless
human beings who ended up with no life at all.
They were just used.”
“It
was a job to be done,” says Henry, “but it was their choice. No one said they had to do it.”
Eunice
pushes a green bean around on her plate before stabbing it with her fork,
lifting it to her mouth and chewing, her eyes averted.
The
meal lapses into silence, Eunice retreating into her world, Henry to his.
Henry
passes on the talk about the swamp when they gather at Thompson’s the next
morning but the information fails to generate much interest. Charley Mitchell put it this way: “For all this guy has to say about the old
canal, we still don’t know exactly who he is or why he came here. That’s what I’d really like to know.”
If
the men hoped to find out from Eunice, they would be disappointed. The next day her visit to the captain is
brief, hardly more than five minutes.
When Henry asks why, she tells him she needed to
run errands and do laundry, work around the house. While Henry knows that without more
information to impart he will no longer be the center of attention at Thompson’s,
he is content. Maybe, he thinks, life
will get back to normal. He doesn’t stop
to consider that it is normal for life to change.
The
following day the talk at Thompson’s is about how the captain and his boat have
disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived.
When he left, or why, is a matter of speculation.
John
Norville says the boat was there a little after 9:15 the night before when he
crossed the State Street
Fred
Burton says he knows for a fact it was gone by 6:00 a.m. Kenny Hawkins told him so when he got gas on
the way to work.
Jeffrey
Lambert says that sales had never been better in his shop than when Captain
Smith’s boat was tied up there.
Henry
Pruitt, stone-faced, says his Eunice is gone too.
That
knocks the words right out of everyone.
Poor Henry. She didn’t even leave
a note. It is a day everyone feels the
need to hurry back to work. What can
they say to Henry? But the first thing
they tell their wives and families when they get home is that Eunice Pruitt ran
off with the strange old bird who captained the canalboat.
No
one questions the truth of this assumption.
After all, hadn’t she been sitting on his deck day after day? Hadn’t she been seen taking evening walks? Wasn’t there a noticeable flush on her
cheeks? Wasn’t she even heard to giggle
when she used the pay phone by the Exxon station?
Probably
even Henry accepts this explanation of her disappearance until Lou Sutherland says two mornings later
at Thompson’s that his daughter who lives in Palmyra
“So
he must’ve turned around and headed back where he came from,” Lou said.
“Was
Eunice...?” the others ask. But, no,
Lou’s daughter says the captain is alone.
The news is chilling.
“Those
canallers were a violent breed,” John Norville mentions darkly.
“We
never got a decent explanation who he was or what he wanted here,” says
Charley.
“The
police should be called in,” says Fred.
“Unless
she didn’t go with him,” says Henry.
That
idea takes some getting used to. “Where
else would she have gone?”
“I’m
not sure,” says Henry slowly, “but I found this in her bureau drawer.” He pulls a postcard from his shirt pocket and
with shaking hand, places it on the table.
It
reads:
Dear
Eunice Pruitt:
Congratulations! Your name has been selected to win at least
one of the following prizes:
A
diamond ring.
A
Farrari.
A
trip to Rome
Notification
of your acceptance is required.
“It’s one of those promotionals,”
says Jeffery.
“Now
I can’t see Eunice tempted by diamonds or some flashy sports car,” Henry is musing, “but a trip to Rome Rome
here.”
“Keats died
in Rome
Henry looks
up. “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? ‘Ode to a Nightingale’?”
John
nods. “‘When I have fears that I may
cease to be’” he adds to the list.
“That’s
it then,” says Henry. “How can we check
this out?” But even with John Norville’s
resources and journalistic research skills, nothing can be found out about the
promotional. In fact, John says flat out
that he suspects it is a hoax. Ferrari
is even spelled wrong, he observes.
By
then the gang at Thompson’s is apparently more interested in solving the
mystery of Eunice’s disappearance than Henry is. Other than saying that he will not call in
the police, that the Pruitts handle their troubles privately, Henry refuses to discuss
it anymore. He changes the subject,
bringing up some obscure fact he’s read in newspaper fillers or remarking on
how he polished off a whole quart of Walt Thompson’s peach ice cream while
watching the baseball game on TV.
That
leaves the others to speculate among themselves and after a while the subject
wears itself out. It’s a story left
dangling without a conclusion until the Tuesday before Labor Day when Eunice’s
letter of resignation arrives at the superintendent’s office. It says she will not be returning to her
teaching post inasmuch as she has moved out of the area to Rome , New York
Jeffrey
Lambert says the story of Eunice and Ari Farr is about as romantic as it
gets. John Norville adds that the canal
has always had an aura of romance, but Henry shrugs at such big statements,
muttering that he doesn’t see anything romantic about a man who wears a
ponytail. Anyway, he says, he’s thinking
of selling his house and his hardware business.
Maybe he’ll move to Florida where the seasons never change and a person
doesn’t have to worry about dreary winter skies and rotten weather.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE
STORY
This story was inspired by a town in
upstate New York where I lived some years ago.
The old Erie
Canal ran through it and dominated our consciousness. The village center dated back to the early
nineteenth century when the canal was a major east-west route. It reflected that era. Its buildings included an elegant three-story
brick structure that began life as a hotel, shops with recessed arches and
shuttered windows, and Federal style colonials with pairs of tall chimneys on
each side gable. Even the “newer” houses
in the village came from somewhat later in the nineteenth century. It was a place where the past kept a firm
grip on the present. We rode our bikes
on the towpath, bought milk at the local dairy farm and crossed the canal on
singing bridges many times a day. I
borrowed many of these features for my story.
I even commandeered a group of local businessmen who gathered each
morning at a coffee shop on Main Street, talking about the weather, the economy
and bits of local news.
I had a sense of Henry when I began
the story and I knew Captain Thomas J. Smith would show up, but I didn’t know
about Henry’s daughter Eunice and Ari Farr.
My eye was fastened on the town and the canal. I wasn’t thinking about change and the way it
creeps up on us. While I was writing, an
old folk song kept running through my head.
“I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie
Canal.” The barges that plied the Erie’s
waters carried settlers to the west and brought lumber, coal and hay back to
the markets in the east. The canal
opened up new land and provided people with new opportunities. It was all about moving to the future. I realized my story was about that too. My characters, whether they were staying or
going, were navigating change.
*****
ABOUT LINDA DYER
Linda Dyer writes both prose and poetry. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of
publications: literary journals such as The
Fourth River where “Navigating Change” was originally published, Soundings East, Rockhurst Review, Poet
Lore, Slant and Teaching Cather;
anthologies including Where the Mountain
Stands Alone, Heartbeat of New England and The Blueline Anthology; newspapers, including the New York Times, the Hartford Courant and the Christian
Science Monitor and online journals such as Poet’s Canvas and Brevity. She is currently completing work on a
biography with a narrow focus titled Portrait
of a Writer at Work: Willa Cather in Jaffrey. She lives in Amherst, NH and serves on the
editorial board of Amoskeag at
Southern New Hampshire University. Her
website is: www.lindadyer.me.
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